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Try your hand at what the lame-duck president was trying to say these past eight years

Jan 14, 2009 04:30 AM
David Olive
COLUMNIST
The Toronto Star

"The only man, woman, or child who ever wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead," American poet e.e. cummings said on the passing of U.S. president Warren G. Harding, precursor to the far more extravagantly syntax-challenged George W. Bush.


Bemused by his losing battle with the language, but happy in his good fortune to occupy the White House just the same, Bush told the 2001 graduating class at Yale: "And to the C students, I say, you, too, can be president of the United States."

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now for the dozens of gag writers in the field of late-night comedy – a frightening number of them Canadian – obliged to quit Earl Grey for Wild Turkey as the Miscommunicator-in-Chief gives way Tuesday to a new president showing little sign of a propensity to mangle either the language or domestic and foreign policy.

Gags there will be, but alas much fewer and further between.

Assuming Dubya's future pensées are of interest mainly to the Crawford Daily Bugle, here's your last chance to review the 43rd president's greatest hits and identify the word or phrase he was attempting to convey.

1. "Kosovians can move back in."

2. "Keep good relations with the Grecians."

3. "If the East Timorians decide to revolt, I'm sure I'll have a statement."

4. "It is incredibly presumptive for somebody who has not yet earned his party's nomination to start speculating about vice-presidents."

5. "If the terriers and bariffs are torn down, this economy will grow."

6. "Governor Bush will not stand for the subsidation of welfare."

7. "This is Preservation Month. I appreciate preservation. It's what you do when you run for president. You gotta preserve."

8. "I do not agree with this notion that somehow if I go to try to attract votes and to lead people toward a better tomorrow somehow I get subscribed to some – some doctrine gets subscribed to me."

9. "I don't want to win? If that were the case why the heck am I on the bus 16 hours a day, shaking thousands of hands, giving hundreds of speeches, getting pillared in the press and cartoons and still staying on message to win?"

10. "Other Republican candidates may retort to personal attacks and negative ads."

11. "I'm very gracious and humbled."

12. "I did denounce it. I de – I denounced it. I denounced interracial dating. I denounced anti-Catholic bigacy."

13. "This case has had a full analyzation and has been looked at a lot. I understand the emotionality of death penalty cases."

14. "A tax cut is really one of the anecdotes to coming out of an economic illness."

15. "I am a person who recognizes the fallacy of humans."

16. "I don't want nations feeling like that they can bully ourselves and our allies. I want to have a ballistic defence system so that we can make the world more peaceful, and at the same time I want to reduce our own nuclear capacities to the level commiserate with keeping the peace."

17. "They said, `You know, this issue doesn't seem to resignate with the people.' And you know something? Whether it resignates or not doesn't matter to me, because I stand for doing the right thing, and the right thing is hearing the voices of people who work."

18. "They misunderestimated me."

19. "I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors."

20. "Ann and I will carry out this equivocal message to the world: Markets must open."

21. "Whatever it took to help Taiwan defend theirself."

22. "Thirdly, the explorationists are willing to only move equipment during the winter, which means they'll be on ice roads, and remove the equipment as the ice begins to melt, so that fragile tundra is protected."

23. "I want to thank the dozens of welfare-to-work stories, the actual examples of people who made the firm and solemn commitment to work hard to embetter themselves."

24. "Over 75 per cent of white Americans own their home, and less than 50 per cent of Hispanos and African-Americans don't own their home. And that's a homeownership gap. And we've got to do something about it."

25. "There was no malfeance involved."

26. "I need to be able to move the right people to the right place at the right time to protect you, and I'm not going to accept a lousy bill out of the United Nations Senate."

27. "The law I sign today directs new funds and new focus to the task of collecting vital intelligence on terrorist threats and on weapons of mass production."

28. "Columbia carried in its payroll classroom experiments from some of our students in America."

29. "There was a time when many said that the cultures of Japan and Germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values. Well, they were wrong. Some say the same of Iraq today. They are mistakened."

30. "We've got hundreds of sites to exploit, looking for the chemical and biological weapons that we know Saddam Hussein had prior to our entrance into Iraq."

31. "That's why I went to the Congress last September and proposed fundamental – supplemental funding, which is money for armour and body parts and ammunition and fuel."

32. "We have enough coal to last for 250 years, yet coal also prevents an environmental challenge."

33. "Do you realize we've got 250 million years' of coal?"

34. "It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of – and the allegations – by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble – that means not tell the truth."

35. "After the bombing, most Iraqis saw what the perpetuators of this attack were trying to do."

36. "I was not pleased that Hamas has refused to announce its desire to destroy Israel."

37. "My brother Jeb, the great governor of Texas."

38. "I don't have to accept their tenants. I was trying to convince those college students to accept my tenants."

39. "How do you know if you don't measure, if you have a system that simply suckles kids through?"

40. "We ought to make the pie higher."

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ANSWERS

1. Kosovars
2. Greeks
3. East Timorese
4. presumptuous
5. tariff barriers
6. subsidization
7. Perseverance Month
8. ascribed
9. pilloried
10. resort
11. grateful
12. bigotry
13. analysis
14. antidotes
15. fallibility
16. commensurate
17. resonate
18. underestimated
19. successors
20. unequivocal
21. itself
22. explorers
23. better
24. Hispanics
25. malfeasance
26. United States Senate
27. weapons of mass destruction
28. payload
29. mistaken
30. explore
31. body armour, not body parts
32. presents
33. 250, not 250 million
34. dissemble
35. perpetrators
36. renounce
37. Jeb Bush was governor of Florida, not Texas
38. tenets
39. coddles
40. bigger


http://www.thestar.com/article/570546

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Great Moments in Presidential Speeches